This is/has been my first full season fishing for stripers and I would have to say I am a little worried with what is going on as far as managing the striper stocks.

I come from the land of steelhead and the management problems are about the opposite of what we have going on here. Back home taking of steelhead for commercial reasons far outweighs the problems of recreational angler retention. Even with these problems you do see rec anglers willing to make sacrifices as to their take in an effort to do what they can to help the fishery. Currently you can only keep one wild fish a year back home, that is it. This was supported by the majority of anglers. The current theory is once you clean up your act then you can try and fix the commercial problem. I think a little of that thinking could help here.

Problems I see here:

The big spawners are being eliminated. Unlike steelhead where most any returning fish can spawn succesfully , regardless of age and size, we know who the spawners are when it comes to stripers. I am amazed and perplexed we are not seeing a push for a slot limit. This has done wonders in other fisheries and I feel it could really help stripers as well. Why not have a 28-34 inch limit for retention? This still would provide food for the table but protect the big girls. I do not want to see anglers lose their right to keep a fish but we gotta be smarter about how we go about it.

Anglers are taking too many fish. The sudo commercial take by rec fisherman is wrong. Stripers should not be used as a means for rec guys to pay their gas bills. Also if you do not tun in your catch card you should never be allowed to get a license ever again.

Forage species dissapearing. I hardly saw any big herring or menhaden this year. Well I saw lots of menhaden in the spring but a commercial boat was right behind them netting them to hell in the upper bay. Also the fact these boats were not even from Rhode Island leaves a bad taste in your mouth. We have to save our big forage species, period. Banning herring this year for use as bait was a huge step. Hopefully we can do something about the menhaden take all along the east coast. We cannot have a healthy striper population without forage species.

I do like most of Ted's articles but I wish he would provide more scientific backing to his claims. Saying 50% of released stripers die leaves me a little skeptical. Where did he get that info?